What I Did on My Vacation, or, Memoirs of GPSing.
By Jake Richards
First, let me say what this article is not: It is NOT a review of any of the products mentioned in it, nor is it an endorsement of any of the products mentioned. It is a narrative of how GPS can be used when traveling to unfamiliar locations (either in your own country or not) on vacation or business. My thought was to recount our experiences with GPS travel so that if and when you travel you can gain from our experiences.
Ok, enough said. Here are the dry facts:
Travel to UK from the US from May 15, return on June 2, 2004.
Objective: Road trip to various parts of England.
Equipment:
· Rental Car (Ford Mondeo)
· Axim X5 Advanced with 512Meg SD card, 256Meg CF card
· Seidio G2500 mount (windshield suction cup mount with swivel base)
· Haicom 303 MMF GPS receiver with external antenna
· Power cord to Seidio mount
· Cables for serial connection between Haicom and Seidio mount and from Axim to Seidio audio input
· One “sticky” leather pad for the dashboard to keep GPS from slipping around
Software:
Mapopolis 4.42, installed on SD card with latest UK maps (NC version) installed on CF card
Results:
My wife and planned a long vacation to Great Britain. We used to live there, so instead of re-visiting London, we decided to travel around by car and see places we either had not gotten to when we lived there or to visit again. In addition, we wanted to visit with several friends with whom we have maintained contact over the years. Two years ago we made a similar trip and I remembered how much time I had to spend with maps to plan my travel, so this time I was determined to use GPS to take the worry and work out of that aspect of the trip.
After some quick research I chose to use Mapopolis maps. There are numerous map suppliers for Europe, including the two most popular, TomTom and Mapopolis. I had both of these software suites for the US, so either would do. I ultimately chose Mapopolis for two reasons: 1. A couple of folks from UK who have used both gave both pretty good reviews and 2. The maps were cheaper from Mapopolis. TomTom has better map handling, Mapopolis is slightly faster. I prefer the cleaner display of Mapopolis, but that is entirely a personal preference. I don’t particularly like 3D views, so that didn’t attract me to TomTom. Given that either would work, I let price be the deciding factor.
I ordered and downloaded the UK maps a couple of weeks before we left and spent some time getting familiar with the maps. I was familiar with Mapopolis already and the maps worked exactly as the US maps did, so it didn’t take long to get comfortable with them. If you are buying software, maps and hardware just before you travel, you should plan on doing some experimentation and learning before you go. Traveling down a busy highway is NOT the place to be learning how the software works and/or what is displayed on your maps!
We arrived on a Friday night and picked up the rental car on Saturday. I left our hotel and went to the rental car lot and found our assigned vehicle. I immediately installed the Seidio mount in the car, right there in the rental car lot. The suction cup was firmly attached to the glass on the first try. I arranged the gooseneck so that the mount rested on the top of the dashboard to minimize bouncing when moving. The power outlet was in the console between the seats, so I had to mount the Seidio in the middle of the windshield in order for the cable to reach. I put the sticky leather pad in the center so that I could see the LED on the receiver and used a bit of Velcro tape to tidy up the wires.
This above picture shows the final arrangement. Getting Mapopolis started with the GPS unit was a breeze. I did note that the windshield of the Mondeo had very fine wires in it (de-misting?) and was concerned that the receiver would not function properly without using the external antenna, but in a matter of minutes I had a location fix and solid signals on 9 of 9 satellites! Wonderful stuff, this! It turned out I never needed the external antenna at all. Nevertheless, I recommend that if you plan to use a unit like this in a rental car that you have the external antenna just in case you get a car with the coating that blocks the GPS signals.
Now the adventure begins. Mapoplis has a very awkward approach to maps. They identify maps by county, and you need to load all the counties you want to use, or load the start and end counties and use the “Major Roads” map to connect them. Unfortunately, there is also a limit on the population of those counties that restricts you to only 20 million population available at one time. (The limit does NOT apply to the Major Roads map.) UK has a population of 51 million or so, so you cannot simply say “open contiguous” with every county available or you hit the limit. That limitation leaves a couple of options. One that only occurred to me much later is to delete any counties from the directory that you do NOT plan ever to use (Wales, Scotland, etc). Doing this deletion can then leave you with only the counties you might want, and if the total population is less than the limit and if you set Mapopolis only to use the one directory, then “open contiguous” will work. You can also plan from day to day and put into directories the counties you need for the next day, then open contiguous in that directory. As I said at the beginning, Mapopolis currently has an awkward approach to maps.
However, those approaches using directories did not occur to me at the time, so I started by opening the Greater London map. Unfortunately, that left off Heathrow, so I was without a starting location even though I had a fix. I started adding counties in a blind stab at finding Heathrow and finally located it in Middlesex county. Ok, now I had a full map and I could plan my route.
The next adventure was that international addresses don’t follow the same format as here in the US. For most locations in UK, for example, all that is given is the road and Postal codes. For example, our hotel was listed as Bath Road Hayes, Middlesex UB3 5AN. There is no street number, just “Bath Road.” For origins, you don’t care about that ambiguity, but for destinations, it’s a little unnerving just to enter a street. Fortunately, any given road in UK is usually short, or if long, has multiple names that break it up into segments so that it was easy to find what you wanted once you were on the right road. Also, UK has literally thousands of small villages dotting the countryside. As a result, searching for a name without narrowing down the search was usually lengthy. I quickly caught on to the trick of picking the location by city or village first, then street name. Also, in the UK where all you want is to get to the main part of a town or village, the default name of High Street works very well, as does _village_ road, where _village_ is the name of the village you are seeking, or the name of the village from which you will approach it. For example, out of the village of Bardwell, in Suffolk, there is a road called Diss Road. As you approach the village of Diss, the road changes name to Bardwell Road. That pattern repeats itself all over England, giving you at least a starting point for finding the village itself. On one occasion we wanted to find the town of Pakenham to find a pub called “The Fox” there to have dinner (it was recommended, and was excellent). I entered Pakenham as the town under “Find” and it returned several streets, including Pakenham Road. I picked that road as my destination just to get to the village. As I made the final turn onto Pakenham Road, The Fox was about 100 yards down the road. That scenario repeated itself many times during our travels. The key to making it work was to be flexible and a bit creative in being willing just to get to the village and search a bit. The good news is that as long as you have a fix, you aren’t lost…you’re just in search mode!
But back to the rental car lot: I entered Bath Road and it found the road. I tapped Route To and in a few seconds later I had a route planned. I followed it back to Bath Road and found our hotel without much incident.
Our first real navigation adventure was to get from our hotel near Heathrow airport to Kew Gardens in London. My wife is a tea merchant and wanted to visit a very old tea room nearby. I used the Find function to find Kew Gardens and picked a road that led immediately beside the gardens. My wife had the address as across from one of the gates to the gardens on a certain road road, so I just used the road as the address for the destination. As usual, Mapopolis had a route in just a few seconds. One of the reasons for selecting Mapopolis was the speed of route calculations, which I felt was a reasonable tradeoff for the awkwardness of map handling. That decision was to prove out well in coming days.
I’ve driven on the left side of the highway before, so it wasn’t too much of a challenge, but having the GPS unit advising me well in advance of upcoming roundabouts, turns, exits, etc., definitely took a lot of the worry out of the trip. The Seidio mount vastly improves the audio of the Axim. It nicely fills in the lack of bass response in the Axim speaker and adds volume to the sound. It made even the robotic voice of Mapopolis readily understandable. I could concentrate on driving and wait for the prompts to lead me to Kew Gardens. I had eliminated a lot of the optional voice prompts that are available in Mapopolis so that all it announced was one minute and 30 seconds in advance of the turns. That kept the number of voice prompts to a minimum and meant that each prompt really meant something was coming up.
UK Roundabouts can be challenging if you aren’t prepared for them. Most are well signposted, but it is still daunting as a visitor to get into the roundabout, pick your exit and get out of the roundabout cleanly, particularly if you have to read the signs, make a decision and then act on that decision. Visitors have been known to make multiple trips around roundabouts before getting out! However, Mapopolis announced well in advance the upcoming roundabouts and gave you the number of the exit to take. In the hundreds, maybe thousands, of roundabouts I saw in 14 days driving, Mapopolis only counted one roundabout incorrectly, and that one was as a result of a new road that led to an industrial park that was not on the map. Immediately after I made that one wrong turn, Mapopolis indicated I was off track and I turned around to go back to the roundabout to get to the next road out. Thank goodness for quick re-calculation times!
I used the “bread crumb trail” function of Mapopolis to leave a marker on the map where I had been. This feature also served me well in returning to locations. I was able to see the breadcrumb trail and just follow it back to any place I had been. It also told me when I was re-visiting a road that I had already been on when searching for a specific location in a village or city. That feature also saved me making new plans when I had deviated for some reason from the original path and just wanted to get back on the original track. All I had to do was drive back over the bread crumbs and I returned to the original track.
I’m not going to detail all of our travels, but let me say that using GPS to navigate in unfamiliar territory is really nice. I had my software set to be neutral about using major highways, and to find the fastest route from start to destination. As a result, we got to travel down some very beautiful country lanes that I would never have chosen from a paper map. For those who haven’t traveled to UK, there are several classes of highways there: “M” Roads are major superhighways with limited access, equivalent to the US Interstate system. “A” Roads are major highways with unlimited access, ranging from very wide (like interstates) to two lanes. The rough equivalents to A roads in America are the US routes. “B” roads tend to be smaller, but do have some locations where a full two lanes are available. Again the rough equivalents in the US would be the State highways. Country Lanes are narrow, usually only wide enough for one vehicle. These lanes do have wider spots every half mile or so where you can pull over to let someone by if you meet someone on the lane. I don’t know an equivalent in the US, as in the US a one lane road that narrow would not normally be paved and would be very rough, but in UK they all are paved and very well maintained. My own personal tendency is to get to major highways (M or A) as quickly as possible, even if I have to go a few extra miles. With my software settings, it did want to get me to a major road for the long haul, but it was creative in getting me to those major roads. As a result, we spend a lot of time on beautiful country lanes and got to see some villages that we never would have seen had we not followed the guidance given by the software, but still made very good time from Point A to Point B. We drove from London, through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall to Penzance, back to Hartland Quay, then to Wells, Cheddar, Bath, Stratford-upon-Avon, Stoke on Trent, Coventry, Bradford/Leeds, York, the Yorkshire Dells, then down through Nottingham and Cambridge to Bury St. Edmunds and Suffolk and finally back to London. Never lost, never worried. My wife, who is normally the navigator (even though she hates it), loved the freedom the GPS unit gave us. We never had to worry about getting lost, or being on some strange road. She quickly became confident that it would lead us to where we wanted to go, so she sat back and enjoyed the ride.
What Didn’t Work
Not that the trip was without flaw. Mapopolis has a small display of the upcoming intersection on the lower left corner of the display. Most of the time the depiction of the physical layout of the upcoming roundabout was incorrect. It usually showed an extra road entering the roundabout at the same place as the road you were on. This extra road was on the left of the road you were on. I believe it was an attempt to display the divided highway (as most are at roundabouts) joining the roundabout. The error is that the extra roadway should have been on the right, not left, if that was the case, and in any event it probably shouldn’t have been there at all. Also, most of the time the exit path out of the roundabout was not actually in the direction shown. However, in every case but the one I cited earlier, it properly showed the right count of exits to the one you wanted. So in a few minutes I learned to ignore the little diagram and follow the verbal and written directions, not the little diagram.
There were also some odd occurrences when traveling on an “A” road and getting directions to leave the A road for a B road, go about 50 feet, turn around and return to the A road in the same direction as you had been traveling. These strange directions didn’t seem to follow any pattern, but may have been at some hidden seam in the data where for some reason the database didn’t indicate you could continue straight ahead on the original road. After this happened once, I got into the habit of looking at the bigger map display when I got the warning prompt to turn to confirm that I was actually going to be turning onto a new road, not just zig-zagging back. This anomaly occurred maybe 5-6 times in the entire 14 days of driving, so it wasn’t a critical failure, but it was curious.
Finally, one time in Stratford-upon-Avon we had just left a car park to travel to our next destination and the software directed me to take four consecutive right turns, which led back to the car park again. When it started to repeat the same four right turns, I realized it was somehow lost in a loop and just ignored one of the turns. When it re-planned the route just after the “missed” direction, it fixed itself and gave me good directions to my destination. That event was just plain strange! But again, the rapid re-calculations of Mapopolis saved the day. Within seconds of when I ignored the turn it had recalculated and presented me with a new set of directions.
On our next to last day driving we had a hardware failure. The power cord to the Seidio separated at the connector. The constant pull on the connector created by the location of the power outlet in the center console and the coiled cord being stretched to reach the mount caused the failure. As a result we lost power to the GPS and mount. I didn’t have my power adapter for just the Axim, so this power failure was fairly inconvenient. As a workaround I copied maps from the CF card to the SD card and removed the CF card to use the Haicom as a CF card. As we only needed GPS directions for a couple of hours, the battery in the Axim was sufficient to get us to where we wanted to go. I tried to find a replacement cord, but in the limited time I had available I couldn’t find one. For the final drive to return the rental car near Heathrow I used Mapopolis to plan the trip, then followed along with the Axim, only turning it on at critical times to conserve the battery and not using the GPS receiver at all. It was still useful as a route planner, and it did help when we got closer to the rental car location and into city traffic. My wife followed along with the Axim and read me the upcoming turns to get through. We made it without incident. The lesson learned was to carry a spare adapter just in case.
Twice the Haicom refused to find a location fix after it had been powered off for a while. In both cases I simply unplugged it to remove power from it and then reconnected it. In both cases it immediately found a fix. I suspect it may have been some communications conflict of both the Axim and Haicom powering up at the same time when I switched on the ignition in the car.
Summary
Travel with GPS is delightfully simple and easy, but you do have to learn the software and hardware you plan to use in advance, do some planning each day (or night, for the following day) and you do have to keep an eye on what it is trying to tell you to do, not follow it blindly. However, GPS does give you a peace that no matter where you go, you aren’t really lost and can always find your way to where you want to go. Remember the six “P”s - proper planning prevents poor performance. Do some planning, some homework, practice with it a bit and GPS can make your vacation travel much more pleasant overall.
Follow Us
RSS Feed
Follow on Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
